Overview: My primary research this summer was with Benjamin Ho on a project about the value of explanations in social settings. For example, let’s say you take the last cookie from the cookie jar. Once someone notices the last cookie missing, there are a variety of ways in which you might explain yourself: apology (“I’m sorry!”), guilt (“Oops, I feel terrible!”), and selfishness (“Too bad, I wanted the cookie!”) amongst others. We set out to determine the different types of explanations people give, the circumstances in which they arise, the strategies that people employ when explaining themselves, and whether people actually change their behavior as a result of past explanations (i.e., after saying sorry, one might expect less selfish behavior).

Process: First, we needed a way to obtain explanations. For this, we created an online survey (http://goo.gl/xtshAl) and turned to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing platform, to send it to people all over the country. Participants in the experiment are given money for completing simple tasks. They then have the option to take money from other participants, profiting more for themselves at the expense of others. After they make a decision about how much money to take, participants are asked to explain their actions to their partners. Some of the “takers” know about this explanation ahead of time; they have more information on the basis of which to make decisions regarding how much money to take. In other treatments, we vary the takers’ ability to pay to avoid sending an explanation or to guarantee that an explanation is sent. The experiment is then repeated three times with different people. Lastly, we vary both the money awarded to takers (ascending vs. descending payoffs in each round) and the timing of the explanation in the experimental process.

Brief summary of results: We obtained over 1850 responses in the three rounds of our survey. Five MTurk users sorted each explanation we collected, and tests for robustness confirmed adequate sorting. Below is a summary of people’s take rates versus the type of explanation they gave.

We found that a majority (55%) of people wanted to take any money at all from their partners, suggesting that many people are unselfish, even when using a platform like MTurk that is designed solely for their profit. Of those who took any money, the average take rate was around 45%, but it varied wildly by type of explanation sent. Those apologizing or admitting to selfishness took the most; those who were honest or fair in their explanation took the least; those who admitted to being guilty took the average. Only 11% wanted to pay to make sure their explanations were or were not sent, and most of these people tended to send guilty explanations even though guilty people behaved in the most average manner of any group of explanation-senders. We did not find largely significant changes in behavior across rounds of the experiment, so there is evidence to suggest that people’s behaviors are not calculated in a split second but rather formulated in a longer-term way. Additionally, people who were informed ahead of time about the future explanation took less than average by about 12%, and those who could pay to avoid the explanations took more than average by over 5%.

Afterwards & moving forwards: I gave a talk explaining these results at the BEEMA conference at Haverford this June entitled “The Present Value of Future Explanations.” In addition, the Economics faculty at Vassar have helped us greatly in the process of designing our experiment and analyzing our findings. As we finalize our understanding of the mechanisms at work behind people’s behaviors in the context of explanations, I will be writing up our results for publication sometime this fall.

The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970.  After almost fifty years of environmental activism, however, the most profound challenges facing our globe, including climate change, pollution, and resource depletion, have yet to be adequately addressed.  While studying the current environmental movements and theory is crucial to understanding our present crises, it is even more important to encourage students, not to follow in their predecessors’ footsteps, but to conceptualize new forms of dissent that might be more successful at inciting agency and substantial change than past efforts. This summer, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Pinar Batur, Director of Environmental Studies, to create the syllabi for two Environmental Studies Senior Seminars in which the participants will evaluate current political and economic structures and seek to imagine more successful counter-protest movements.  Both of these seminars include class projects where students address a corresponding environmental issue on campus and the Hudson Valley to foster praxis.

SENIOR SEMINAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: LET’S TALK TRASH!

The first Senior Seminar syllabus I organized with Professor Batur was “Let’s Talk Trash,” which focuses on all aspects of waste including the American culture of disposability, the production of waste in a capitalist system, and the unsustainable dumping of all of this trash into landfills, incinerators, and waterways.  This seminar also studies how waste became a form of environmental racism as most waste disposal areas are disproportionately placed in poor, minority communities and analyzes the social movements that erupted as a response to these injustices. The seminar will culminate with a class project that uses Vassar as a center for a comprehensive anti-trash movement by focusing on food waste at Vassar, sustainable systems and trash education in the area, and recycling.

SENIOR SEMINAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: DISSENT IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

The second syllabus I worked on combined many different types of readings such as plays and novels with social theory and environmental research to give students a broad theoretical understanding of dissent in the context of environmental movements.  This seminar will specifically focus on climate change with discussions on the shortcomings of the current political and social responses and projects that challenge students to conceptualize other forms of dissent that will incite more international agency on this pressing issue. This seminar has been scheduled for the Spring 2015.

Student Project:  I also had the opportunity to work on an independent project.  I chose to research and document the role of Vassar College and Alumni in dissent and its various articulations.  I have contacted and interviewed Vassar alumni who work in the “environmental field” including lobbying, agriculture, business, and nonprofit organizations.  In these interviews, I will aim to find out how Vassar students begin a career in the environmental field and understand if and how these students can create a culture of dissent from the status quo while working within current power structures.

Our project explores the link between migration and health. Specifically, we examine the effect of internal migration (the movement of people within their country) on the health of immigrant retirees. There is a growing literature on the health impacts of retirement, but not much work has explored the relationship between movement and health. Atella and Deb (2014) shows that Italian women in poor health showed significant improvements in health from moving from the South of Italy to the North. Stillman, McKenzie, and Gibson (2009) use evidence from a randomized immigration lottery in New Zealand to find that immigrating to a new country has a positive impact on mental health, especially for those in the lower end of the mental health distribution before immigrating. Previous literature seems to suggest that retirement also has a positive impact on health. Most published papers on this topic, including Insler (2014) and Neuman (2008) use instrumental variables to estimate the health impact of retirement. A notable exception to the general trend of the literature, Dave, Rashad, and Spasojevic (2008) suggests that retirement actually has a small negative effect on health.

Building on this previous research, we have used data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) released monthly by the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate the differences between the health of immigrant and native retirees. These two groups differ significantly by a number of characteristics, such as family size, age, and educational attainment. As a result, it is natural to expect that immigrant and native retirees will have different health levels. The graph below shows the portion of immigrant and native retirees who have moved in the past year that report being in good health. This suggests that immigrant retirees are less healthy as a group than natives, though this might be due to demographic differences between the two groups and not merely a result of immigration status.

Similar preliminary research found that stayers were more likely to be in good health than movers, though this might be because many retirees move due to poor health. The small sample size of immigrant movers in the CPS for any given year made it difficult to assess whether moving had a similar negative association with health when comparing immigrant movers and stayers.

It remains unclear whether immigrant and native retirees and movers and stayers vary in health outcomes as a result of their movement status or due to differences in the composition of the groups. Future research will attempt to determine the causal effect of movement on the health of immigrant retirees. We hope to use the Health and Retirement Survey, a dataset which follows the same group of retired individuals over time, to more accurately assess the impacts of movement within a country on health. This dataset will include zip code data that will allow us to get a richer description of the movements of retirees within the US.

First, to fully understand the type of laser data that I would be working with for my Ford project, I was able to experience the process of conducting a laser survey first-hand and then to toy with the resulting data, creating rotatable sections, and viewing the building in a virtual, three-dimensional space with true to life color.

performing a high-definition laser survey of the Vassar Chapel

three-dimensional representations of the Chapel comprised of the millions of points procured during the laser survey that can be observed from all angles and sliced into any desired sections 

Chartres Cathedral

Bourges Cathedral

During my time in the Ford Scholar Program, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Andrew Tallon in creating the first truly accurate, non-rectified plans of the Gothic churches of Chartres and Bourges. Using sections of laser data that reveal the wonderful irregularities of these structures, which have been set in place after centuries of shifting and settling and have gone mostly undocumented, we have managed to represent, with great precision, the churches as they stand today. These new, laser-based plans expose the realities of the structures as never before and will add new depths to the study of these major, art historical buildings.

-Destin McMurry (’16)

To this day, Preston Sturges remains one of the most celebrated screenwriters in American film history. His clever dialogue and ridiculous antics took the screwball comedy genre to a new level. In addition to writing, Sturges began directing his own films in 1940 with The Great McGinty. His career spanned more than twenty years and he managed to leave a lasting impression on Hollywood.

A still from Sturges 1937 film Easy Living.

This summer, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Sarah Kozloff on the first academic anthology ever published by Sturges. As an editor, Professor Kozloff was responsible for editing drafts from contributing writers, preparing photographs for the publisher, and establishing a consistent writing style for the book. To assist in the editing process I kept track of information on each chapter and made a style sheet. I also captured screenshots from several of Sturges’s films and edited them in Photoshop for the best print quality.

Preston Sturges in his director’s chair.

In addition to editing the anthology, Professor Kozloff also contributed two chapters. The first chapter discusses Sturges’s strength as a writer compared to his directing ability. Professor Kozloff argues that while Sturges enjoyed the control that came with directing his own screenplays, many of his films ultimately benefited from the influence of other directors. In the second chapter, Professor Kozloff explores Sturges’s influence on later filmmakers. She pays special attention to Ethan and Joel Coen who have previously acknowledged Sturges as one of their inspirations. Their 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? took its title from the film-within-a-film in Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s character in Intolerable Cruelty (2003) bears a strong resemblance to the cunning heroines of films like The Lady Eve (1941).

A still from Sturges’s 1935 film The Good Fairy.

To aid Professor Kozloff in the writing process, I conducted extensive research on each of the films discussed. This included finding books and periodicals in the Vassar library and making use of many online resources. Databases like WorldCat, Media History Digital Library, and EBSCOhost allowed me to find scholarly articles and film reviews that provided useful information. In addition, I was able to view Production Code documents on Sturges’s films on microfilm. I learned a great deal about the academic writing and researching processes. Once published, I have no doubt that the anthology will prove to be an important contribution to the world of film scholarship. I am extremely grateful to have received the opportunity to participate in such a fascinating project.

This Summer I worked with Professors Firtich and Ungurianu on a research project which explored Russian Science Fiction Cinema. The project’s ultimate goal was to assist in the initial stages of gathering research for a book that the professors have begun writing on the topic, and exploring the trajectory scifi took from the Revolution in 1917 all the way through to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Additionally, I helped the Professors in developing course materials for a class on Russian Sci-fi Cinema that Professor Ungurianu plans to teach in the future.

A still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece, Solaris

While Russian Science-fiction cinema is a very deep field (in my research I discovered well over a hundred films which belong to that category) the majority of its riches, beyond perhaps Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris which has an ardent following in Europe and the States, remain almost wholly unknown outside of the former Soviet bloc. Throughout my time working on the project, I created a comprehensive spreadsheet of all science-fiction films made in the Soviet Union/Russia. I was also tasked with making a comprehensive bibliography of all academic texts and scholarly works written about the field, as well as bibliographies of major texts about Russian Science-fiction literature (a field with its own plethora of important and highly influential works, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s phenomenal We – a precursor and almost certain inspiration to George Orwell’s 1984) and Western Science-fiction. Through these assignments, I was able to get a good sense of just how much research and effort goes into the creation of an academic work while simultaneously having the opportunity to discover many new films, some of which I now hold among my very favorite.
The research ultimately culminated with a project looking at the trajectory of space exploration in Soviet science-fiction cinema. Beginning with Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), generally considered the first Soviet science-fiction film ever made, and going all the way through to Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986), the project broke down Soviet space exploration on screen into 5 distinct phases: Revolutionary, Heroic, Philosophical and Metaphysical, Consequeces of Human Action, and Dystopian. Coupled with each of these phases was a film used as a mini-case study of that unique category. Having this as the final part of my Ford Scholarship, allowed me to put all of the research I had done over the course of the Summer into practice and can hopefully be used by others as a brief introduction into this fascinating, little known genre of cinema.

A still from Kin-Dza-Dza!, one of the best scifi films to come out of the Soviet Union (and, unfortunately, one that remains almost wholly unknown in the United States)

The Book of the Courtier plays a significant role in the history of courtesy literature. Written by Baldassarre Castiglione over the course of twenty years, it remains the most definitive account of the life and culture among the Renaissance nobility. The handiwork of the 16th-centruy diplomat addresses the aristocratic manners of the Italian Renaissance and the constitution of a perfect courtier. It was read widely and influenced the writings of representative figures in Western literature and civilization, such as William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. The project works on the first Chinese translation of the book from its Italian original.                                                             Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, Dover Publications, 2003

Initially, different editions of the book that have been published over time were compared and contrasted. We began the translation with the fourth edition of Il Libro del Cortegiano by Vittorio Cian in 1947 and the second edition of Il Libro del Cortegiano: con una scelta delle opere minori di Baldassarre Castiglione by B. Maier in 1973. Moreover, we researched and referenced the literature of Renaissance historiography, such as Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, in order to attain a more sophisticated understanding of the Renaissance culture and philosophy. In the process of the translation, the most acclaimed English editions have also been taken into account, i.e. Charles S. Singleton’s translation as well as annotations in 1959, George Bull’s translation in 1967, and so on.

                                                                                                    Renaissance court dance

The next phase of the project is to continue with the translation of the book and the revision of annotations. The complete translation of the book is intended for publication. With China’s long-standing solicitude for morality and social manners, the book will add to the discourse of etiquette in the contemporary society.